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Darwin not the next big mining hub: expert

Governments may have to accept Darwin is not going to be the country's next major mining hub, an academic says.

There has been plenty of growth but not much development of the region, as primary industries centralise in Perth and Queensland, said Rolf Gerritsen, a professorial research fellow at the Northern Institute at Charles Darwin University.

He said the north needed to reconsider how it plans its future around commodities and the delivery of government services.

"We may have to accept that Darwin is never going to be mining central," Mr Gerritsen told a conference on the development of the region in Darwin, pointing out that although minerals and LNG could be sourced there, they were likely to be processed in other, more cost-effective mining hubs.

Northern Australia experiences escalated migration with people from the southern capitals moving up to kick-start their careers before moving on, he said.

"If long-term stayers are rare, how do we deal with long-term development?"

Whereas in the past regional towns developed around industry, now industries were increasingly being operated from the south via mobile workforces, preventing development, Mr Gerritsen said.

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Fly-in fly-out workers at mines and drive-in drive-out service delivery for indigenous communities is hampering development, he said, and the biggest impediment to northern development is the region's inability to adequately engage with indigenous people.

"The assumptions are that we have the power to force Aboriginal people to do what we want; well, we don't," Mr Gerritsen said.

"If they choose to resist they will, and the resistance takes the form of behaviours that create bad health in the long term, alcohol, and so on."

He said governments should devolve power to regional hubs and to work with indigenous communities to build the programs and services they needed, rather that prescribing them with limited consultation.

Aboriginal landowners also had to be brought on board for developing industries such as aquaculture, he said.